


Initial Here and You're Set

by stifledlaughter



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Apartments, Deep Dish Nine, Gen, M/M, the moving feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 10:23:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7636510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stifledlaughter/pseuds/stifledlaughter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moving in, settling in, moving out.<br/>A handful of scenes from the lives inside the apartments of Julian and Garak over the years.</p><p>----</p><p>Deep Dish Nine AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Initial Here and You're Set

**Author's Note:**

> So I have moved back from France and two months later, finally have my own place! So this was inspired by me finding my own room in a big city and beginning to restart a life here. There isn't a better way to do that than with DD9, obviously.  
> (Also I have NO idea how med school timing works, I read on The Internets the 4 years in med school is right so I am using that timeline here.)

Julian held the keys loosely in his hand as he surveyed his new studio apartment.

The kitchen countertops had odd, patchy stains on the worn beige plastic. The windows looked suspiciously shaken and beaten, as if they had taken a few blows or survived angry exes throwing items out of them. The hardwood floor had chips out of it and long marks from multiple pieces of furniture being hauled in and out.

It was perfect.

Julian threw himself down on the air mattress (which he then chastised himself for- he can’t pop this nice air mattress Keiko, the botanist living in the same building, had lent him) and buried his face in the sheets he had been given (also by Keiko, who tsked when Julian said his towels from college would be fine until he could afford new sheets).

“I’m home,” he said happily, and wriggled into the sheets. The weird banging from the room next door, the rushing of cars outside the window, the funktastic smell from the cabinets, it all was his.

Free from the haunt of his parents’ stares and pushing words. Free from scrambling to hide his mail before his father could go through it to see what he got accepted to and push him towards the most prestigious medical school. Free from having to see the faces of those who had changed him irrevocably.

Free to make himself who he has wanted to be but could not while living there.

Keys gripped tightly in his hand now, he stood up and looked over his boxes lined up outside the door, his precious few items in the world awaiting their new home.

Free.

\--------------------------

Garak gripped his keys tightly in his hand as he surveyed his new apartment.

Dim windows. Not enough for the flowers from Cardassia, who needed brilliant, warm sunlight to survive. Perhaps some herbs… he would need to find the local varieties and maybe a garden shop to see how to best make them flourish in this cold, unwelcoming land.

His few boxes were quickly dragged in, and as he shut the door, he turned to look at the bright, unnatural florescent lights. Nothing like the sun from home.

Home. _Don’t, Elim. You’re Mr. Garak the tailor here. Home is this… this place._

Outside, he heard the rushing of cars, and from the tiny window at basement level he could see feet stepping past, some struggling grass patches, and the road.

He shuddered and began to look up mattress companies in the area to call in a dusty old phonebook he had found in a cabinet. He came here with nothing but an armful of boxes, the few items his contacts could get smuggled in for a handful of favors and (perhaps) a threat.

Trapped in this little town, dodging the people who exiled him. Trapped in a role he could not escape from, sewing clothes for people who would run terrified if they knew what else his hands had held. Trapped alone, alone, so cold in this basement.

Keys held loosely in his hands, he sank to the floor, looking at his boxes, and sighed, his fate settling onto his shoulders like a heavy, icy coat.

Trapped.

\----------------------------------

_A year and some scintillating conversations later…._

“It’s a little small. I got this studio because it was the cheapest and they said if I moved in right away I’d get free utilities. It was kind of nice to get a few weeks before school started to settle in, you know?” Julian stood outside the door, twisting his hands together as he looked at Garak. “Okay.”

“Are you going to let me in, or am I supposed to be making kind remarks about the door?” asked Garak dryly. “It’s a wonderful rectangle shape. Very even corners. What a lovely lock.”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” muttered Julian. “It’s just, your apartment is so… nice?”

“It’s all in the details my dear. Now let’s go in, unless we are to spend the evening here discussing my apartment.”

Julian slid the key in the lock and pushed it open, hoping that he had remembered to do the dishes this morning and wipe up that weird spill on the counter.

Garak glanced over everything, his keen eyes missing nothing. Julian held his breath, realizing that while he had gotten the weird spill by the stove, he had completely missed the one on the front (not inside) of the microwave.

“It’s very charming,” said Garak, who settled down on the couch, sliding his leather bag to the ground next to the worn sofa.

“I… got most of the furniture from the free part of Craigslist. I moved in as they were throwing out a bunch of desks and cabinets at the hospital and so I got a bunch of those too, and then the plates and towels, well Keiko and Miles had been cleaning out their old stuff and I got a bunch of that too, and their linens and…” He realized he was babbling.

“So none of these items were yours to begin with?” Garak did notice, after briefly studying the room, that it felt distinctly mish-mashed – none of the styles were truly Julian. Keiko’s linens were floral and warm and the couch was slightly ripped and clearly had been at its prime when boy bands had reached their apex. The desk from the hospital, with its metal edges and lockable drawers, felt oddly sterile next to the paint-splattered dresser.

“Hm… now that I think about it, I didn’t really buy a lot. Turns out people will throw old stuff at you if you just ask. Even the bed, that was Miles’ old twin that he had in the apartment before Keiko moved in. They were saving that for Molly when she got older but her grandma gave them a bigger one, so I got this.”

“So what’s yours?”

Julian looked around. Rug was a free one from the local bowling alley when they redid all of their carpet. (For once Quark was a useful connection to have, who had tipped him off to it in the first place.) Most of his kitchen stuff, too, was from the other students who parents dumped too much on them and didn’t need ten sets of cutlery (and perhaps a handful of cups taken from the med school cafeteria. Sometimes they just slip in the bag.)

“I guess… my notebooks? My textbooks? My laptop? I got them all myself.”

Garak pursed his lips, thinking. Julian was wondering where this was going.

“Your bookshelf?”

“Ah, picked that up at a yard sale across the street. Lovely little Klingon lady who was moving back home. You can’t even tell that there’s a hole in the back from a batleth incident. It was only ten bucks.”

“That’s all very well but I mean the books.”

Julian paused and scanned them over. Sure enough, there were the expected med school textbooks, some language books, but also science fiction novels, spy thrillers, and child psychology theory.

“It’s very ‘you’, isn’t it?”

Julian had never thought of his apartment that way. To him, the studio was a place to come back to, sleep, and maybe watch some movies when he did have (miraculous) spare time. The rest of his life was spent on campus or at Deep Dish Nine, or even more recently, Garak’s place. He didn’t see the studio as an extension of himself, just a place to rest.

“I guess I’m not sure why it matters,” mused Julian aloud, his fingers skimming the spines of the books lightly. Some he had not touched in ages but still felt close to, like “Early Childhood Brain Development” and “501 Bajoran Verb Conjugations”. He had picked up the latter when he was accepted to Alpha City’s med school right in the middle of Little Bajor, in his eagerness to connect with his Bajoran colleagues. The other he had picked up when he was sixteen, having learned more about himself than he ever wanted to know, and was searching desperately for answers.

“You’re right, my dear Mr. Garak. You’re absolutely right.”

\-----------------------------------------------

He had been to Elim’s dozens of times now, and was familiar with the sleek black couch and flawless countertops. He always gingerly took off his sneakers as close as possible to the front door and made sure his sweater and coat didn’t have any leaves or anything on them before hanging them in the closet.

Garak kept his apartment immaculate, spotless in its impersonality. Nothing felt like Garak in his apartment but in a different way than Julian’s apartment. While Julian’s place was a mixed bag of free items from the area, a rather faithful image of the community they were both living in, Garak’s was purposefully empty of soul, of telling content of who lived there. At times, Julian felt as though Garak had bought the show unit of the apartment and changed nothing.

So it was a surprise when Julian noticed something different in Garak’s living room – a new shelf had been installed. A bookshelf, to be exact, and books Garak had only spoken of were on there.

“Where had you been keeping them?” Julian asked as he very carefully toed off his shoes on the rug in front of the door. “I haven’t seen some of these before.”

“In the storage unit downstairs.” In a locked safe, of course, with the rest of his very personal belongings, but there was no need to state that. “I have them memorized, as we Cardassians do, but I felt… I should have them out, should you ever want to look.”

Julian felt the presence of the room change, a shift, a vulnerability.

“It looks good in here. It feels more like… you in here, you know?” Julian walked over to it and began to look through the titles. All but a few were in Cardassian, but he had been studying and taking classes on campus so he could make out at least the titles. “All of these State-approved, I hope?”

“How could you think anything otherwise, my dear Julian?” said Garak with a slight smile on his face.

“What one do you recommend I start first?” Julian asked, peering at the various novels and anthologies.

Garak came over to the shelf and immediately pulled out a thick, well-loved one. “This one.”

Julian flipped open the title page, and then flicked to the first chapter, his eyes scanning the words. “The Never-ending Sacrifice?”

“Truly a classic,” commented Garak, his eyes scanning the cover. “Very influential in Cardassia.”

Julian noticed a signature at the bottom. “A signed copy? Really?”

Garak chuckled lightly. “Oh my dear doctor, that’s not the author. It’s the signature of a… dear friend.” A ‘dear friend’ who had risked his life to give this book to Garak as they crossed paths on what would be the last time they would ever see each other. The memory of their hands fleetingly touching as the book was slipped to him at a crowded train station was burned into Garak’s mind.

He was not sure what train his friend had boarded. He dared not search through his contacts to find him. He had already exhausted their favors getting here safely.

Garak watched Julian’s eyes flash through the words with inhuman speed, and felt a warmth bloom in his chest.

It was the warmest he had felt since he had arrived in this city.

\------------------------------------------

“You can back out at any second now,” commented Julian with humor in his voice, but Garak could hear the slight tremor behind the bravado.

“I quite assure you, you are not forcing me to do this.”

Julian looked at the keys in his hand, his faithful friends for the past two years. “Alright, guys. Into the dropbox you go.”

The small, beaten-up box loomed before them, in front of the leasing office, a milestone that neither of them thought they would ever come to during their transient time in Alpha City.

Julian re-read the lease-ending instructions one last time. Put keys in envelope with signed agreement of ended lease. Seal envelope. Drop in box. Check back in a week later to ensure that agreement was processed.

Julian held the envelope above the slot, and then, with much less pomp and circumstance than he felt the situation required, he dropped it in. A small thud and clink signified the end to an era, and the beginning of another.

He turned to Garak, smiling broadly. “Shall we?”

Garak lifted up his hand to display two sets of keys. “Pick one, my dear Julian, and back to our apartment we’ll go.”

Julian grabbed one of the sets of keys and held onto Garak’s hand. “Our apartment.”

 

 

 


End file.
